Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country Read Online Free PDF Page B

who brought Boykin on board as the FRC’s chief operating officer obviously found nothing offensive in the former general’s pronounced views on Islam. In all likelihood, by hiring him, the council meant to send a signal: on matters where its new COO claimed expertise—above all, on how to prosecute the war on terrorism—the FRC was not going to pull any punches. Imagine the NAACP electing Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as its national president, and you get the idea. Spit-in-your-eye political incorrectness had become a virtue.
    In a broader sense, the organization’s embrace of General Boykin makes it impossible to write off manifestations of Islamophobia as tomfoolery perpetrated by a maniacal fringe. As with the supporters of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the early days of the Cold War, those who express hostility toward Islam, whether through words or actions, dare to convey openly attitudes that others in far greater numbers quietly nurture. To put it another way, what Americans in the 1950s knew as McCarthyism has reappeared as what we might call Boykinism, with the FRC as its main institutional base.
    Historians differ passionately over whether McCarthyism represented a perversion of anticommunism or its truest expression. Similarly, present-day observers may disagree as to whether Boykinism represents a somewhat fervent or utterly demented response to the Islamist threat. Yet this much is inarguable: just as the junior senator from Wisconsin in his heyday embodied a nontrivial strain of American politics so, too, does the former special ops warrior turned “ordained minister with a passion for spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” 5
    Notably, as Boykinism’s leading exponent, the former general espouses views that bear a striking resemblance to those favored by the late senator. Like McCarthy, Boykin believes that while enemies beyond America’s gates pose great dangers, the enemy within poses a still greater threat. “I’ve studied Marxist insurgency,” he declared in a 2010 video. “It was part of my training. And the things I know that have been done in every Marxist insurgency are being done in America today.” Comparing the United States as governed by Barack Obama to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Boykin charged that under the guise of health-care reform the Obama administration was secretly organizing a “constabulary force that will control the population in America.” Designed to be larger than the United States military, it was to function just as Hitler’s brownshirts had in Germany. 6 This vast totalitarian conspiracy was, of course, unfolding while innocent and unsuspecting Americans slumbered.
    The evidence Boykin offered to support his charge was on a par with the evidence Senator McCarthy offered to support his claim to “have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five people … known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party.” That is to say, no proof at all. Yet as in the 1950s, the absence of hard evidence only served to confirm the conspiracy’s nefarious existence.
    In Joe McCarthy’s day, how many Americans endorsed his conspiratorial view of world and national politics? It’s difficult to know for sure, but enough in Wisconsin to secure his reelection in 1952, by a comfortable majority of 54 to 46 percent. More important, enough to strike fear into the hearts of politicians who quaked at the thought of McCarthy fingering them for being “soft on communism.”
    How many Americans endorse Boykin’s comparably inflammatory views of both Islam and American politics? Again, it’s difficult to tell, but enough to persuade the FRC’s funders and supporters to hire him, confident that doing so would burnish rather than tarnish the organization’s brand. Certainly, adding Boykin’s name to the list of officers did not damage its convening power. The council’s 2012 “Values Voter Summit,”